The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of the #MeToo Movement

Giti Chandra, Irma Erlingsdóttir, Giti Chandra, Irma Erlingsdóttir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367408473
• eBook ISBN: 9781000245554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the MeToo hashtag went viral in 2017, the movement has burgeoned across social media, moving beyond Twitter and into living rooms and courtrooms. It has spread unevenly across the globe, with some countries and societies more impacted than others, and interacted with existing feminist movements, struggles, and resistances.

This interdisciplinary handbook identifies thematic and theoretical areas that require attention and interrogation, inviting the reader to make connections between the ways in which the #MeToo movement has panned out in different parts of the world, seeing it in the context of the many feminist and gendered struggles already in place, as well as the solidarities with similar movements across countries and cultures.

With contributions from gender experts spanning a wide range of disciplines including political science, history, sociology, law, literature, and philosophy, this groundbreaking book will have contemporary relevance for scholars, feminists, gender researchers, and policy-makers across the globe.

Part I

Theories

1

Struggle, solidarity, and social change

Angela Y. Davis

Women have been saying “me too” for a very long time, so long that we should have recognised decades ago that gender violence and sexual harassment are structural, thus deeply embedded in cultures, traditions, and institutions. But it was not until 2017 that sexual assault began to be taken seriously within the mainstream. In the 1970s when we began to speak out, forcefully, against the physical and sexual abuse of women, we did not know that it would be fifty years before this ideological struggle against gender violence would begin to yield material results — fifty years of anti-rape hotlines, battered women’s shelters, and activist commitments, protests, marches, demonstrations. We also did not realise that it would take just as long before racist police violence would be publicly acknowledged. Nevertheless, it is important today to acknowledge the fact that solidarity and struggle eventually lead to change as the #MeToo movement has dramatically shown.¹ By adopting intersectional feminist approaches, we recognise the connection between different social problems, such as gender violence in intimate and more public relationships, and state violence in institutions such as the police and prisons.

When looking back to the United Nations Decade for Women, which culminated in the 1985 non-governmental World Conference on Women),² one realises that it was just a beginning. Perhaps the UN should have declared a Century for Women. While many changes have taken place — and I think it is extremely important to acknowledge those changes because solidarity and struggles do eventually make a difference³ — gender violence remains a world-wide pandemic. The failure to move towards gender equality reveals other disparities as well. In the United States, we have witnessed the collapse of social services that was a direct result of the impact of global capitalism. Beginning in the 1980s, we witnessed the rise of neoliberal assumptions consigning what ought to be social responsibilities to the realm of the individual. As has been repeatedly emphasised in the Nordic countries, the insistence on subsidised childcare and parental leave has gone a long way towards enabling women’s economic and political participation. Incarceration rates in the Nordic countries are also low. The United States, in contrast, has the highest rate of incarceration, with almost one third of all women who are incarcerated in the world being locked up in jails and prison there.⁴

The example of the Nordic countries is important because it helps us understand connections and interrelationalities, but also because it warns us of the dangers of reductionism. We cannot assume that closing economic, educational, and political gender gaps will necessarily and automatically lead to a diminution in the level of sexual harassment and gender violence. In the context of significant economic political and educational advances by women, how does one move towards minimising the consequences of long cultural traditions of male superiority that most dramatically express themselves in terms of violence? Not only physical, but also verbal and psychological violence. As important as it may be to dismantle economic and political structures that promote gender inequality, it is also equally important to break down ideological and cultural structures that legitimise gender violence and sexual harassment in intimate, as well as in economic and other public or quasi-public, relationships. Violence is, for example, as deeply embedded in domestic work as it is in the institution of marriage. If we neglect this ideological struggle, putative advances for women may serve to strengthen the very structures that promote male supremacy, which so often also promote white supremacy.

As Dean Spade and Sarah Lazare have pointed out, women now run four out of the five largest US corporations associated with the military-industrial complex: Northrop Grumman, Boeing Defense, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics.⁵ They are also, of course, in key positions in the governmental defence hierarchy. This raises the question of whether women’s empowerment, regardless of context, is always a cause for celebration. Simply incorporating women into positions of power does not guarantee gender equality or justice in the largest sense. Because we are often primed to celebrate the individual advancements of women or people of colour without taking into consideration that diversity by itself may simply mean that previously marginalised individuals have been recruited to guarantee a more efficient operation of oppressive systems. As Cynthia Enloe observed, “there is no evidence that I’ve seen of the CIA Defense Department or other institutions where only a few women are rising to the top, that they challenge the mission of the company or the organization”.⁶ Placing women in control of institutions of state violence has certainly not helped to reduce the incidence of gender violence, neither within the military nor within the larger world.

Usual conceptions simply ask: how to achieve diversity and inclusion without attending to the transformations that would be necessary in order to achieve justice. Should Black people be included in a society that remains just as racist as it was before we were invited to join? Should women be invited into a world that remains as sexist and misogynist as before? Should disabled people be embraced by a society that continues to perpetrate its ableist ideologies and practices?

Gender violence is the most pandemic form of violence in the world. It raises the question of why advances have occurred in other realms while gender violence has remained unchanged. One of the answers to this question resides in the tendency to individualise the problem. Because we are led to focus primary attention on individual perpetrators as if they themselves are the beginning and end of these violences, we are rarely called upon to reflect on the structural and institutional underpinnings of these violences.

This is an instance where we might learn from struggles against racism that remaining at the level of the individual will condemn us to endless repetitions of legal and other proceedings on the individual level that are actually predicated on the impossibility of purging our societies of sexual harassment and assault. I would like to suggest that we need to forge ways of thinking and talking about these modes of violence — verbal, physical, psychological forms of violence — that do not unintentionally affirm their permanence.

These violences can be ended. We should not have to assume that racist violence, which has such a long history in North America, in every place that has been touched by colonialism and slavery, is a future inevitability. We should not have to assume that women — including Black women, indigenous women, disabled women, trans women, and all the identities that might be embraced by the category “women” — will forever be the targets of gender-based violence. We should not have to assume that intimate violence, child abuse, or incest, will forever be associated with the form of collectivity we call the family. In the United States, we should not have to assume that the proliferation of guns — over 300 million guns in the hands of civilians along with police violence, gang violence, school shootings, community violence — will forever serve as defining features of our communities. Racist, gender, family, community violences are deeply connected to the violence of the state, to repressive apparatuses, such as structures of policing, institutions of punishment, and machineries of intelligence and war.

I have evoked the period of the last fifty years, during which anti-violence activism has been a significant dimension of women’s movements. In the United States, the anti-violence movement is most frequently periodised in connection with the 1966 founding of the National Organization for Women and of the creation within that context of a task force on rape.⁷ Without wanting to minimise the important work that the National Organization for Women (NOW) has done over the years or to undermine the eventual emergence of a very strong anti-rape and anti-violence movement, I do want to trouble this genealogy, just as we have had to trouble the more recent genealogy of #MeToo. As you know, Tarana Burke began using the phrase in 2006 to emphasise the pandemic dimensions of sexual violence within Black communities, but it was Alyssa Milano who was initially credited with the creation of the slogan.⁸ Unfortunately, many contemporary images associated with #MeToo are overwhelmingly white.

Genealogies should always be questioned because there is always an unacknowledged reason for beginning at a certain moment in history as opposed to another. Much of the early work of Black feminism and radical women-of-colour feminism consisted of attempts to correct the historical record, pointing out that white women were not the only women who challenged misogyny and patriarchy, and that oftentimes women of colour engaged these challenges in a more complex, intersectional way. Looking at the genealogy of the anti-violence movement, one should question why the work against rape and sexual violence within the US Southern Black freedom movement came to be so marginalised, so much so that it required years of research and activism to recognise, for example, Rosa Parks for the role that she played in anti-rape activism. Many people only know her as the figure who refused to move to the back of the bus, but she had already accumulated a very long history of involvement in important antiracist activism linked to sexual assault. Beginning with the case of the Scottsboro Nine, then the case of Recy Taylor in 1944 in which a Black woman, in a town called Abbeville, Alabama, was gang-raped by a group of young, white men. A decade later there was the case of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, who was accused of making sexual comments to a white woman, and who was killed as a result. What is interesting is that during that period explicit connections were made between the defence of Black women against rape and the protest of the racist use of the rape charge in cases like the Scottsboro Nine, for example. As many scholars and activists have observed, the struggle to defend Black men from fraudulent rape charges was directly linked to the defence of Black women who were targets of rape. Rape and the racist manipulation of the rape charge were directly connected.⁹

When second-wave women’s movements emerged during the late 1960s in the United States, the catalyst was precisely the recognition of the ubiquity of the physical and sexual abuse of women. This form of violence has always crossed borders of race and class. But the speak-outs and consciousness-raising sessions that attempted to break the silence regarding rape and domestic violence were primarily associated with white feminism. The strategy consisted of encouraging women to reveal violence within intimate relationships that they had previously kept secret.

These new efforts to break the silence were absolutely necessary. However, it was also true that Black women had forged modes of revealing this violence a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Rebellion, revolution, reformation
• Part I Theories
• Part II Contexts
• Part III Global perspectives
• Index